The homepage of Amazon.com was down this afternoon for less than an hour, the online retailer said.

The homepage was inaccessible around 3 p.m. ET, and possibly before but appeared to be back in operation well within that hour.

"The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes. Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted," Amazon spokesman Ty Rogers said in an email to Computerworld.

Direct links to product pages seemed to be working during the outage.

The only thing visitors saw on the homepage during the incident was this message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable"